Woohoo! I have found out how to remove all styles from a MS Word document. As well as I can I will give instructions for both unsighted and sighted (this is not guaranteed to work in Word 2007, but it should work in all earlier versions) ...
Select the tools menu (alt-t)Go down (arrow down) to Templates and add-ins (yeah really intuitive, no wonder no one found it before) Select or hit enter, this opens a dialog box which can pretty much be ignored
Select the organize button (alt-o) This opens another dialog box (more fun all the time)This dialog has several tabs, but the one it opens to by default (Styles, hey that sounds useful) is the one we want This dialog has two list boxex one on the left, one on the left and one on the right, and other text boxes and buttons. Right now we are only interested on the list box on the left, it is a list of all the styles in the current document. Select the first item in the list box on the left (tab and then arrow down once) Now select all the items in the list box (shift-end is the easiest for everyone to do this step)
Now select the delete button (alt-d)You will now get a dialog that starts Do you want to delete (and then gives the name of the first style)
Select the Yes to All button (tab, then enter or alt-a)Now you will get several dialogs that say cannot delete default style normal or whatever. Just hit enter for ok to all of them.
When all those dialogs are gone, so are all those extraneous styles.The open and save as in wordpad is much simpler. However, it works by wordpad just eliminating anything it doesn't know how to process. It is not guaranteed to remove ALL styles. This really and truly does the trick and leaves all the things that bookshare wants (page breaks, increased fonts for chapter headings, italics, bold, underline, tables (though I am not sure about the formatting inside tables, I haven't checked that yet) intact.
Considering how complicated this is, I don't know if everyone needs to do it. But, hose using screen readers sometimes have trouble with styles when a setting gets messed up and the screen reader decides to say every time a style changes. I have trouble with them because when I use Omnipage inside MS Word to do my scanning and OCR, sometimes Omnipage wants to change a chunk of text to a different font and size and maybe make it bold or something, then do something else with the next chunk of text and yet something else with the next and it uses styles to do this. By eliminating all those styles, I eliminate most of those changing font and size and so on all at once. So, the technique is a bit complicated, but it will save me lots of time and trouble in the future. Well, that's what I hope anyway.
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